Updates are constantly being added to the Video Game Canon. Keep track of all the changes to the list, and the latest VGC Essays, here.
Rolling Stone has been in the listmaking game for a very long time, first publishing “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” all the way back in 2003. But as we move into 2025, they’ve finally turned their editors loose on video games and published a new list of “The 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time“.
In creating their list, Rolling Stone decided to shy away from including dozens of sequels from the same franchise, and to ask how well the classics of yesteryear still hold up today:
The whole world is getting ready to close the book on 2024, which means that it’s also time to meet the newest inductees to the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
A total of 42 new games were added to the Hall of Fame this year, most coming from the great gaming year of 1999. The Shacknews Hall of Fame runs on a 25-year eligibility window and only games released on or before December 31, 1999 can be inducted.
So which games made the cut? The list includes multiple titles from Valve (Counter-Strike, Half-Life: Opposing Force, and Team Fortress Classic), Sega (Crazy Taxi, Samba de Amigo, Shining Force, and Sonic Adventure), and Nintendo (Mario Golf, Pokemon Gold and Silver, Pokemon Snap, Pokemon Stadium, and Super Smash Bros.). But Shacknews didn’t stop there, as they also enshrined Sqauresoft’s Final Fantasy VIII, Crystal Dynamics’s Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Black Isle’s Planescape: Torment, Namco’s Soul Calibur, and Neversoft’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
All told, excluding duplicates, alternate editions, and expansion packs, the Shacknews Hall of Fame now includes 233 unique titles. And they haven’t even reached the first year of the new millennium yet!
All of the titles included in the Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 will be added to the Video Game Canon as part of next year’s update.
Once you see this year’s crop of inductees to the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame, you might be surprised that they didn’t get the call as part of an earlier vote. But less than four dozen titles have been selected to join this inner circle, so it’s also easy to see how some groundbreaking games could slip through the cracks.
And that’s where we are with the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024, which welcomed Atari’s Asteroids, Cyan’s Myst, Capcom’s Resident Evil, Maxis’s SimCity, and Richard Garriott’s Ultima into the fold during a ceremony earlier today. It’s true… but I can hear the questioning tone in your voice.
Wasn’t Asteroids the game that solidified the space shooter as the dominant style of arcade game in 1979? Yup. Didn’t Richard Garriott practically invent the RPG with Ultima? He did. Wasn’t the CD-ROM-powered Myst more popular than any other PC game in the 1990s? You got that right. And aren’t Resident Evil and SimCity beloved classics that people continue to replay every year? That’s a big yes.
The curators and researchers at the Strong Museum also filled in some gaps and had a few nice things to say about each inductee.
Spring is in the air, and that means it’s time for the curators at the World Video Game Hall of Fame to unveil this year’s ballot of possible inductees. The Class of 2024 will be the tenth to be welcomed into the Hall, and this year’s competition will include a grab bag of previous finalists and a eclectic slate of newcomers.
Leading the pack is a trio of two-time finalists, including Capcom’s Resident Evil (previously up for consideration in 2017 and 2022), Harmonix’s Guitar Hero (2020 and 2021), and Cyan’s Myst (2017 and 2019). All three have a strong case for induction, but they’ll be competing against a few other previous finalists, including Elite (which was a finalist in 2016), Asteroids (2018), and Metroid (2018).
But don’t count out the rookies, who come from some of gaming’s less-crowded corners. There’s a browser-based classic from the early 2000s (Neopets), the original city builder (SimCity), an early dating simulation (Tokimeki Memorial), a big name in extreme sports (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater), Richard Garriott’s groundbreaking RPG (Ultima), and the chaotic trivia game that inspired the Jackbox franchise (You Don’t Know Jack).
“Even ten years in, there’s no shortage of deserving contenders that have had enormous influence on pop culture or the game industry itself,” said Jon-Paul Dyson, the Director of the Hall of Fame’s parent organization, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum. “These games span decades. Asteroids is an icon of the late 70s arcade. Myst showed the potential of CD-ROM technology in the 90s. Neopets became a staple of browser-based, free games as we entered the 2000s. And Guitar Hero, which is less than 20 years old, has already proven its staying power.”
As always, the World Video Game Hall of Fame is opening up the voting to the general public between now and March 21. Make your choice at WorldVideoGameHallOfFame.org, and the three games that receive the most votes will be submitted as a Player’s Choice ballot alongside the other ballots from the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee.
The World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024 will be announced on Thursday, May 9, at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time). And if you’re unfamiliar with any of this year’s finalists, you can learn more about them after the break.
It’s December, and that means the editors at Shacknews are back with yet another batch of inductees for the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
The Shacknews Hall of Fame operates on a 25-year eligibility window, so any game released before or during 1998 is eligible to be enshrined in the outlet’s pantheon of play. The Class of 2023 is the third group of games selected by the site’s editors, and with most of the obvious titles from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s already accounted for, the majority of this year’s inductees were originally released between January 1, 1998 and December 31, 1998 (though one selection, Mario Party, didn’t make it to the US until February 1999).
Among the 38 new additions to the Shacknews Hall of Fame are Half-Life and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the twin titans of 1998 that are perennially at the top of Best Games lists from across the decades. A lot of people have gone to bat for 2023 as one of the best years ever for games, but that sentiment was also in the air during 1998, and those two games are far from alone in the Class of 2023.
Heavy hitters such as Metal Gear Solid, Pokemon Red and Blue, Resident Evil 2, and StarCraft are well represented, as are fan favorites like Banjo-Kazooie, Final Fantasy Tactics, The House of the Dead, and Thief: The Dark Project.
Aside from all this flash and substance, the editors also found some well-deserved space for Nokia’s Snake in the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
All of the titles included in the Shacknews Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023 will be added to the Video Game Canon as part of next year’s update.
It’s arriving a little later than usual, but the 2023 Update to the Video Game Canon (Version 7.0) is now available.
Four brand new Best Games lists are now included in the calculation, as well as a handful of older lists (including one from 1985). The four newly-published lists come from British GQ (“The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time, Ranked by Experts“), Digital Trends (“The 50 Best Video Games of All Time“), Sports Illustrated/GLHF (“The Best 100 Games of All Time, Ranked“), and USA Today’s For the Win/GLHF (“The 100 Best Video Games of All Time“). Those last two lists appeared about six months apart, and though they share a similar pool of GLHF contributors, they’re fairly different.
Reaching back to 2016, I also added Gamereactor’s “Top 100 All Time Best Games” to the dataset, as well as “The Greatest Games: The 93 Best Computer Games of All Time,” a guidebook to the best games of all time by Dan Gutman and Shay Addams that was published by Compute! Books in 1985. It is, by far, the oldest list within the Video Game Canon, and a fascinating time capsule into what the conversation around games was like almost four decades ago (more than 60 games are unique to this list).
Finally, the Class of 2022 from the “Shacknews Hall of Fame” was added to the Video Game Canon as the site’s editors and contributors continued to expand their massive exploration of everything that’s great about video games.
So how did all of these additions affect the ranking of the Video Game Canon? As in most years, there were a lot of little changes and some very big swings in the standings.
Sports Illustrated has been a staple of mailboxes and magazine racks for nearly 70 years, but it’s not a publication you would normally associate with video games.
That said, they’ve published a few great pieces about video games over the years, including an oral history of NBA Jam that helped kickstart a new appreciation for the arcade classic and this colorful interview with John Madden about his namesake football simulation. Believe it or not, they’ve even branched out into esports, with the launch of the aptly named Esports Illustrated in the Spring.
The magazine also (sort of) published their first-ever Best Games list earlier this year, though I missed it at the time.
As the official magazine of the British Film Institute, the editors at Sight & Sound regularly poll hundreds of critics and directors to aggregate a list of the Greatest Films of All Time. This once-a-decade undertaking was last compiled in 2022 and uses a simple premise: each voter is able to select ten films and the final list is ranked based on which films were mentioned most often.
The methodology for British GQ’s “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time, Ranked by Experts” is slightly different, but the recent list is probably the closest analogue the video game industry has to Sight & Sound’s poll.
Like Sight & Sound, British GQ asked critics and developers to submit a personally ranked top ten list of games… without including any guidance as to what “The Greatest” meant. But that “personally ranked” bit means that the methodology of this list differs slightly from the Sight & Sound poll. Each voter’s top title received ten points, second place was given nine, third place picked up eight points, and so on down to a single point for the game in the tenth position. From there, the final list was ranked according to the total number of points each game received.
Sam White, British GQ’s resident Games Columnist, sent out 300 invitations to partake in the poll and received 239 responses. A total of 652 games received at least one vote and the game in the top spot not only accrued the most points, but also the most #1 placements among all voters as well.
So which game came out on top amongst this expansive panel of experts? Drumroll please…
Digital Trends has been covering the tech industry since 2006, but in all that time they’ve never tried to put their own spin on a Best Games list. But the site’s editors finally took their shot earlier this week when they posted “The 50 Best Video Games of All Time“.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us has had a pretty good year. An enhanced remake known as The Last of Us Part I helped set new standards for accessibility in games when it debuted on the PS5 in September. HBO’s hugely popular live action adaptation followed in January to rave reviews and some of the highest ratings in the network’s history. And now, it has been inducted into the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2023.
Three other games were inducted this year, and each one sparked a revolution in video games in their own way.
Nintendo’s Wii Sports launched alongside the Wii in 2006 and popularized motion controls in a big way. Not only did Nintendo’s traditional audience love it, but the game also became a favorite of seniors and inspired Sony and Microsoft to introduce motion peripherals later that generation.
Like Wii Sports, Mattel Media’s Barbie Fashion Designer also opened up video games to a new audience in 1996. The dress-up game sold more than half a million copies in its first year (more than megasellers like Doom or Quake over a similar span of time), kickstarted a conversation about gender and gaming, and served as an introduction to technology for many women.
Finally, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabny’s Computer Space, the first commercially-available video game, has made its way into the World Video Game Hall of Fame
The historians and curators from the World Video Game Hall of Fame spared a few thoughts about the Class of 2023, which you can find after the break.
